Is there a difference between a command line flag and a command line option?

Question

I am hearing these two terms interchangeably and I am wondering if there is any difference between them, like flags are for one letter options or flags are after a single dash.

Solution 1

You'll probably find "arguments", "options", and "switches" are also often used interchangeably in this context as well.

"Flags" specifically, are Boolean arguments, set by the mere inclusion of the command-line argument, with no additional data needed or allowed for the argument. If you include the argument/option/flag, it counts as "true" and if you exclude it, it counts as "false".

Example Flag-type argument:

command.exe -DeleteFiles

Example of non-flag argument:

command.exe -ServerName my.server.com

More info

Solution 2

According to Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby 2 the main distinction is: a switch doesn't take arguments, while a flag does. Quoting directly from the book (page 15):

Typically, if a switch is in the long-form (for example --foo), which turns “on” some behavior, there is also another switch preceded with no- (for example --no-foo) that turns “off” the behavior.

Finally, long-form flags take their argument via an equal sign, whereas in the short form of a flag, an equal sign is typically not used. For example, the curl command, which makes HTTP requests, provides both short-form and long-form flags to specify an HTTP request method: -X and --request, respectively. The following example invocations show how to properly pass arguments to those flags:

curl -X POST http://www.google.com
curl --request=POST http://www.google.com

Comments

[clozach]

I haven't seen any evidence to support either assertion below re: the "official" distinction between flag & option, which suggests that @Anthon's humble response to the same question over on unix.stackexchange might be more accurate, if less definitive: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/285575/….

[Broots Waymb]

Simple and effective explanation. You could probably even put that 2nd paragraph into the tag wiki for flag, since it has no description currently and that makes it a bit less ambiguous.

[jlang]

out of curiosity: how would one call the "some string" part of the call? In a first shot I would say it's simply an "argument", but if so, how would one call all arguments including the switches/options/flags? Aren't all these things kind of "arguments"? How could they be distinguished by name?

[Manuel Jordan]

I think -X something is an argument, for example in Gradle is possible define gradlew build -x test . Now about --request=POST I would say it is an argument, but I am not sure.